Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

The history of Jerkcity stretches back to the mid-to-late 1980s, when Michael Lopp (aka Rands), Tristan A. Farnon (aka Spigot), and two others known to the world only by their handles (Deuce and Pants) met on BBS services in the San Francisco Bay Area. By the mid 1990s, all four were constantly connected to a private chat room, where they blew off steam and amused each other with dick jokes, programming jokes, and other off-color humor. In May 1998, Rands purchased the jerkcity.com domain name independent of any actual use for it; ideas included using the domain for a masturbation resource.
The genesis of the Jerkcity strip itself occurred when Rands discovered Microsoft Comic Chat and decided that, along with the domain name, he now had all the ingredients for creating a comic strip based on the three years of logs from the group's private chat room. He culled jokes from the logs, generated a few sample strips, and put the whole affair on jerkcity.com.
Jerkcity production continues today in much the same way as it has since 1998. First, jokes are culled from the private chat logs. Next, the dialogue is "spoken" by an army of IRC bots while the producer of the strip observes the strip's creation in Microsoft Comic Chat. The producer may then choose to reset the strip and replay the dialogue until the desired combination of timing, framing, and facial expressions is achieved. At this point, the strip may be tweaked using any number of image-manipulation tools. Finally, the strip is run through several automated perl scripts which add the title, credits, URL, and grey text, at which point the strip is queued for publication on jerkcity.com.[1][2][3][4]

Characters and Dialogue
Jerkcity features a central cast of four characters — Pants, Rands, Deuce, and Spigot — and a dozen or so minor ones[5]. Almost all characters in the comic strip, including the main characters, are standard characters bundled with Microsoft Comic Chat, and each character is thus depicted using a limited number of pre-existing poses and expressions. As a result, characters will often indicate action through onomatopoeia even though they appear to be doing nothing more than standing in one place and talking[6], and are sometimes covered with censor bars to suggest nudity[7][8]. The strip's dialogue is often absurd, obscene, and/or completely incomprehensible gibberish[9][10], and is occasionally redacted without explanation[11][12]. Because of the inscrutable nature of much of the dialogue, the site contains an official glossary, which helps to explain various slang used in strips, like "HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL" (the onomatopoeic representation of "dicklicking") and "T" (chat lingo meaning "Tell", followed by the name of the person who is being addressed).
[edit]Themes
The primary themes of Jerkcity include drinking [13], drug abuse[14] (especially marijuana[15]), misogyny[16], prostitution[17], gluttony[18], dick jokes[19], homosexuality[20], masturbation[21], oral sex[22], anal sex[23], coprophilia[24], coprophagia[25], urolagnia[26], urophagia[27], sex in public toilets[28] (many strips even take place in a public men's room[29]), glory holes[30], other homosexual [31], homophobic[32], and/or paraphilic activities[33], and computer programming[34]; also, cocks[35]. While certain Jerkcity installments make misguided attempts at bringing some class and refinement to the strip's often crude and ridiculous content[36][37], many other strips indicate that Jerkcity holds no pre-tense of actually being worth reading in the first place[38][39][40][41][42].
[edit]Story
Jerkcity contains almost no character development, plot, storyline, or continuity (it is described by its creator as "a story told out of order"[4]). Sometimes, however, a running joke which demands some level of continuity asserts itself, such as in the Big Faggoty Dick series, the Rape Cops series[43], the Holy God series[44], the Zen Boners series[45], the For Fags series, a series of strips hand-drawn and subtitled in Esperanto due to technical difficulties[46], a period in the autumn of 2000 in which the characters went on strike[47], a series of strips in which Pants refuses to come out from under the sink[48], a series of strips in which the Jerkcity players hold auditions for the role of the Cockbot[49], and a series of strips not featuring Pants or Deuce due to them being "arrested by S.H.I.E.L.D."[50]. In another instance, Spigot and Deuce poke each other in the eye[51]; subsequent strips portray both with an "X" over one eye. Their eyesight was inexplicably cured[52] some two and a half months later. The Jerkcity players occasionally act out scenes from Spigot the Bear, which is ostensibly a T.J. Hooker-like cop drama, although the episodes tend to bear little resemblance to any sort of cop drama and appear instead to be subtle variations on the standard Jerkcity repertoire.
[edit]Real-World Commentary and Interaction
Jerkcity appears to take place in its own universe of endless gay sex and drug abuse, including its own schedule of holidays[53]. However, the strip does occasionally comment on real-world mainstream news ephemera and current events, such as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal[54], the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr.[55], the Terri Schiavo case[56], the trial of Robert Blake[57], the Laci Peterson abduction[58], Tom Green's battle with testicular cancer[59], the paralysis of Christopher Reeve[60], the murder of Sherrice Iverson by Jeremy Strohmeyer[61], the incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal[62], the release from prison and subsequent probation of Kevin Mitnick[63], the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on Manhattan[64], the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami[65], the death of Charlton Heston[66], the cancellation of the 2007 revival of The Bionic Woman[67], the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama[68], the Bernard Madoff investment scandal[69], and even a woman left in a makeshift grave after the flooding of New Orleans[70]. Strips have also included OpenBSD bug reports[71], corrections to this Wikipedia entry[72][73] (including a statement that a contemporary version of this article "needs more references"[74]), ridicule of a Wikipedia admin[75][76], ridicule of Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales[77], and ridicule of Wikipedia in general[78][79][80][81].
In November of 2004, some cast members went to Disneyland and left contact information for Jerkcity fans to send messages while in the park. Staff replied to many of these messages with pictures taken from a cellular phone's built-in camera[82][83].
[edit]Production and Publication
Once or twice a year, comics are substituted with photographs without explanation. In some strips, one of the standard backgrounds is replaced with user-created or submitted images[84][85][86][87]. Although the backgrounds are usually inconsequential to the strip's story, there have been occasions where the background is either a running gag in and of itself or actually affects the story. On 14 June 2004, a series of strips with a white background began; characters noticed the lack of a background and provided commentary[88]. Even though the strip's dialogue soon reverted back to normal, the backgrounds remained white until 7 August 2004[89]. From 26 January 2009 to 21 November 2009, all strips took place, without explanation, in a public men's room[68][90]. After a short hiatus, the men's room background was brought back for another run from 3 December 2009[91] through 2 February 2010[92]. At the logical extreme of the strip's sometimes-cavalier attitude towards the traditional comic strip format, strips are occasionally posted with intentional production errors which render them partially or completely unreadable[93][94][95][96][97].
Although a new Jerkcity strip is usually published every day, there have been periods of respite in the publishing schedule. Sometimes, this is intentional, as when the strip's publishers officially took a vacation in August 2004[98], but other times, it seems that the Jerkcity team simply forgets that the queue of unpublished strips has gone empty. In these cases, the strip will usually return with an apology of some sort, although the sincerity of these apologies varies widely[99][100][101]. At times, more than one strip per day has been published, as with the publishing of three strips on 30 December 1999[102][103][104] and, two days later, the publishing of two strips on 1 January 2000[105][106]. Notably, Jerkcity's first few months of existence saw the strip published on a haphazard schedule[107]. Despite these inconsistencies, the comic celebrates its own publishing milestones, as when strip 4000 was published on 19 October 2009[108].

sometimes i think "man, i wish i could be sure which wikipedia article is absolutely, undeniably, objectively the best"

On the "about" page, he says that this first chapter took him a year. If he could afford to work on the comic full-time, he estimates he could do four chapters a year. It's really gorgeous stuff, so I hope he keeps it up either way.